Experimenting With Golden Silverpoint & Digital Matte White Grounds

Yesterday's mail brought the long back-ordered Golden Silverpoint ground. I had ordered it in a fit of experimentation lust quite awhile ago. DickBlick was out of it and one thing led to another and I forgot it until it arrived. I also had bought some Golden Digital Ground in matte white that I had been wanting to try out - so I tried them at the same time.

I had never heard of Silverpoint - "what the heck is this"" I thought? Ah!Something to to explore! Silver point, it turns out, has a long and noble history in the field of art and drawing. Who knew? There is a wonderful website called silverpoint web that will tell you all you want to know. about this amazing art form. One thing I know is that I have to hustle up some sort of real tool to try this stuff with. My experiements were interesting, but I know that the real thing will be awesome. Golden has a great write up about this new product in their publication "Just Paint", which, if you love to paint and draw, you really do need to check out and subscribe to! Golden makes an amazing array of ground products. I am just beginning to really experiment with some of their gessos and grounds - so you can look for more posts about them in the near future. I am really pretty excited about some of the things I have been playing with - things that I have wanted to try out for some time. Playtime really lifts my spirits - and gets me going! I love to try new things and learn new techniques - it's the gadget girl in me I guess.

The photo below:
I covered some scrap printer paper with some Silverpoint ground and then grabbed the things that were on my desk to try out. The top of the examples have ground and the bottom portion (where you can see I taped) are plain. I simply HAVE to get a real tool for this!

Below: left to right:
an embossing tool that I use for metal ,a paper clip (not reall visible!), a berol Prismacolor pencil, a Lamy Safari fountain pen with a medium nib, a Berol 6B pencil, a Staedtler Triplus marker - very fine nib),a Berol mechanical pencil (left line using just the metal nib and right line using the lead). The embossing tool was nothing special but at least the makes showed up. The colored pencil, ink, pencil, marker and mechanical pencils all worked. The ground made a lovely smooth surface for any sort of medium & encouraged a bit of spread for ink and marker. The pencils just wrote super smoothly. Have I said i need a real tool for trying this?!

Below are some plain copy paper prints I tried:

Left to right: plain copy paper, Golden Digital Ground for inkjet printeres in matte white, Golden Silverpoint ground. Obviously the Siverpoint ground really is not effective for inkjet printing. Perhaps not as obvious is the improvement in the color when using the digital ground. The volors really are more rich and vibrant. Keep in mind this was printed on regular old printer paper and I did not adjust the settings - so that's actually a lot for the ground to achieve with no special adjustments made to photo or printer.

Below is a bit more of a close up of the plain copy on the left and the digital ground on the right. The colors are much better with the ground - so I know there will be more of them in my paint box to try out as soon as I can afford to order them. I hope Blick will have another sale soon so that I can get some more to try!